Effect of freeze-thawing on the long-term stability of calcium levofolinate in 5% dextrose stored on polyolefin infusion bags

Abstract

Under the conditions of this study, calcium levofolinate in 5% dextrose infusion may be prepared, frozen in advance by CIVAS, and then microwave thawed before use. Such treatment extends long-term stability and releases pharmacist's time for major activities such as checking medication order errors.

Leachables from Saline-Containing IV Bags Can Alter Therapeutic Protein Properties

“…Although the current practice for preparing dulanermin IV administration does not involve freezing and thawing, utilization of a centralized intravenous additive service (CIVAS) where the IV solution for small molecule drugs is stored frozen is quite common and gaining popularity [35][36][37]. Essentially, CIVAS would prepare the IV solutions in advance, store the solution in a freezer, and thaw the frozen solutions prior to administration.…”

Guidelines for the practical stability studies of anticancer drugs: a European consensus conference: Table 1

“…Freezing of drugs in their final bags can improve the long-term stability of many drugs42 43 and could be very interesting for technical and economic reasons. Thus, considering the high cost of many anticancer drugs and the strong need to improve workload in centralised units, the consensus group would like to encourage more research in this field to ensure freeze-thaw cycles are properly validated and are reproducible.…”

Microwave freeze-thaw technique of injectable drugs. A review from 1980 to 2014

“…The stability for a period of 24 hours at least was described for 17 drugs in 8 papers [22,[26][27][28][29]34,41,43,48]. Indeed, only 3 teams have tested the long-term stability after MFTT, the first for ganciclovir after 7 days [51], the second for ceftizoxime after 30 days [36] and the third for 19 drugs after 11 to 70 days described in 18 papers [16,23,31,38,39,46,49,50,[52][53][54]58,60,62,[64][65][66]73].…”